1. Technical Field
This invention relates in general to microprocessor performance and more particularly to dynamically assigning counters to physical registers from a pool of counters to track mappings of logical registers to physical registers for mapper based instruction executions.
2. Description of the Related Art
A processor may execute one or more types of instructions. One type of instructions may require copying the contents of one register to another register. For example, move register type instructions are a type of instruction that involves copying a value in one register to another register. In one example, instructions that require copying the contents of one register to another register may be used to preserve data that may be altered in response to one instruction, but may be needed by a subsequent instruction. Because of the frequency of instructions such as move register instructions that require copying the contents of one register to another register, a mapper unit of a processor may execute move register instructions by mapping multiple logical registers to a single physical register to effectively copy the contents of one logical register into another logical register without having to physically move the contents from one physical register to another physical register.